Babelle

Babelle

The city was blue and runny orange, with beads of cold light on the corners like a can just out of the fridge, and lemons and panes of glass that were as fat and full as grapes, and from which fell reflections as cool and slow as snowflakes.

Buildings as pink and plump as fat babies giggled when the sun caught their sides, and walls were as pale and gentle as satin curtains when the wind blew them into tickling ripples. The bulges were pregnant bellies in summer sunlight, and if you looked closely you could see the kicking inside like apple elevators rolling upwards under their rosy skin.

The slow blue snails crawled on top of each other, spirals on spirals on spirals to reach the sky, and when it rained they were a wriggly waterfalling fountain that made the babies screech in delight, and the spinning tops high above threw cool water all around them like a summer spray of holy water from friendly fingertips.

Purple robed dignitaries struggled to stay upright as they were sat on by unruly red children who laughed like lighthouses, and were bridges reaching out to each other in the icy fog. In the clouds the yellows were white and the giggles far away, but as they passed the sun seemed ten times brighter, the laughter louder, and the droplets on everything made it all sparkle like diamonds.

Sometimes the fog doesn’t clear at all, and all I can hear is a quiet tinkling, and the creaking of precarious towers of lemons. The clouds are water and your sun is the sprinkling of spray and so Babelle, you are bright, and silky in the shape of a city fat with light, and smiles.